SOURCE: "Christina Rossetti's Poetry: The Art of Self-Postponement," in Love and the Woman Question in Victorian Literature: The Art of Self-Postponement, The Harvester Press, Sussex, 1983, pp. 3-25.

In the following excerpt, Blake examines the themes of time, waiting, and "balked desire" in Rossetti's poetry.

"Hope deferred"—Christina Rossetti repeats this phrase from Proverbs 13.12 over and over again in her poetry. A discouraging phrase, it emphasises and extends the postponement already implied by hope. No other poet returns so often to words like lapse, slack, loiter, slow, tedious, dull, weary, monotonous, long. She plays on the relation between long and longing; long gets longer in a favourite word, lengthening. A poet with a "birthright sense of time", she usually counts time as slow suspense, suspense so slow that it loses almost the eagerness of suspense. By contrast, "Goblin Market" (1862, written 1859) displays vividness and speed, luscious fruits and an "iterated...